Books like Luster
Edie, a young Black woman in New York with a failing publishing job and a painting habit, starts seeing a white man in an open marriage and ends up living in his New Jersey house with his wife and their adopted daughter.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Luster
All Fours
A semi-famous artist in her mid-forties sets out to drive alone from Los Angeles to New York, stops at a motel thirty minutes from home, and does not leave, spending a fortune remaking the room around a sudden obsession.
Milk Fed
Rachel, a twenty-four-year-old talent-agency assistant in Los Angeles who controls her life through strict rules about food, falls for the zaftig Orthodox Jewish woman who works at her frozen yogurt shop.
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
A young woman in New York medicates herself into months of hibernation, trying to sleep her way out of grief and into a new self.
Detransition, Baby
A trans woman, her ex-boyfriend, and his pregnant wife form an unlikely family in New York, navigating parenthood, identity, and who gets to start over.
On Beauty
Two academic families, the liberal mixed-race Belseys and the conservative Trinidadian-British Kippses, collide in a New England college town in Zadie Smith's update of Howards End.
Big Swiss
Greta, who transcribes the recorded sessions of a sex and relationship coach in Hudson, New York, falls for a client she knows only as Big Swiss, and when she meets her by chance at the dog park, she starts an affair built on a lie.
Notes on a Scandal
A lonely schoolteacher becomes obsessed with a colleague's scandalous affair with a student, and her account of events may not be entirely reliable.
The Pisces
Stuck on her dissertation about Sappho and newly dumped, Lucy house-sits her sister's place on Venice Beach, minds the dog, goes to group therapy and falls for a swimmer she meets on the rocks who turns out to be a merman.
Rabbit, Run
Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom, a former high-school basketball star now selling kitchen gadgets in a Pennsylvania town, walks out on his pregnant wife and young son one evening and keeps driving.
Enemies, A Love Story
In New York in 1949, Herman Broder, a Holocaust survivor married to the Polish servant who hid him, keeps a mistress in the Bronx, and then his first wife, believed dead, turns up alive.
Goodbye, Columbus
A young Jewish man in 1950s New Jersey navigates his first encounters with class, sex, and the gap between the suburban dream and its spiritual emptiness.
Fates and Furies
The marriage of Lotto and Mathilde, a charismatic playwright and his enigmatic wife, is told twice, first from his side and then from hers, and the two stories do not match.